You may not be aware that iRobot, the company famous for making Roomba, also makes robots for the military. (I have a Roomba, by the way and I would get another one immediately if something ever happened to this one.) A former employee at iRobot went off to Chicago to start his own business, which he called Robot FX — and now the sparks are flying!

On his blog, David Brooks reports that the Chicago-based robot firm (Robot FX) is charged with swiping proprietary information about the military robot that iRobot was developing. It seems that both companies were in the running for a $200 million military contract.

Here’s what the Boston Globe has to say about the lawsuit. You won’t believe it.

Parties to a lawsuit are required to preserve all evidence in the case. An iRobot attorney contacted Robotic FX attorney Patricia Kane Schmidt by e-mail and FedEx on the day the suits were filed, urging her to warn her clients not to destroy evidence. But documents filed by iRobot say that on the evening of Aug. 17, Ahed, watched by private detectives from Kroll Inc. hired by iRobot, emerged from the Robotic FX offices and loaded several boxes into the trunk of a white Saturn sedan belonging to Hill, the company’s chief operating officer. The next day, Ahed discarded the items in a dumpster in Chicago, not far from Hill’s apartment. Kroll operatives who witnessed Ahed’s actions retrieved the discarded materials, which included electronics components inside a box marked “iRobot,” as well as the empty carton for a new paper shredder. “Most particularly we found a tool that is a confidential piece of technology used by iRobot,” said iRobot attorney Ruffin Cordell. “It appeared that somebody had gotten hold of a replica.” Cordell declined to identify the tool, but said it had been designed by iRobot engineers for use in assembling PackBots.

Tom Fishburne, a cartoonist whose blog is about “Cartoons, marketing and postcards from London” wrote:

This cartoon idea sprang fully formed from a New York Times piece on the ridiculous lengths that some brands are going to be considered for the Home Depot Eco Options promotion (including, yes, a brand of electric chainsaw). It’s a good example of some of the outlandish greenwashing we’re all starting to see. And, how the issue is not as white and black as the old treehugger/lumberjack dynamic.

I would like to nominate December 9th, the birthday of Admiral Grace Hopper, to be our first international IT holiday. Why Grace Hopper, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you. Anyone whose obituary in Time magazine says “She is perhaps best known for having said “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission” deserves a holiday named after her.

How would we celebrate Grace Hopper Day, you ask? Let’s take a quick look at some of Admiral Hopper’s contributions and see what we can come up with.

Grace Murray Hopper, a pioneer in computer science, is generally credited with developments that led to COBOL, the programming language for business applications on which the world’s largest corporations ran for more than a generation. After receiving her Ph.D. in mathematics at Yale, Hopper worked as an associate professor at Vassar College before joining the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1943. She went on to work as a researcher and mathematician at the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. and the Sperry Corporation. Having retired from the Navy after World War II, she returned in 1967 to work at the Naval Data Automation Command. By the time of her death in 1992, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper had left many contributions to the field of software engineering and was arguably the world’s most famous programmer.

But here are some lesser-known facts:

The clock in her office ran counterclockwise to remind her that there’s always more than one way to do something.

She hated the words “because we’ve always done it this way.”

She joked that she created COBOL because she didn’t like to balance her checkbook.

When she was a child, she practiced her troubleshooting skills (not always successfully) by taking apart alarm clocks.

She called her Admiral’s uniform her “identifier” and used it to remind listeners that every record in a computer must have a unique identifier so it can store data and retrieve it later.

During her lifetime, she was a popular TV talk show guest.

She chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes.

She liked to be introduced as the “third programmer on the first large-scale digital computer.”

She is credited with applying the engineering term “bug” to computing when her team found a moth trapped in a relay of the MarkII computer. It was a joke, but the moth is now in the Smithsonian.

She was first asked to resign from the Navy when she was 40 because she was too old. By the time she was 80, President Reagan had to go before Congress once a year to get permission for her NOT to have to resign from the Navy. She is quoted as saying “I seem to be doing a lot of retiring.”

Amazing Grace, as Admiral Hopper was often called, was a colorful woman who might inspire some interesting ways to celebrate a holiday, don’t you think?

I can just see it. On December 9, we’ll all gather together in hyperspace and celebrate (virtually, of course) Grace Hopper Day. If nothing else, it’ll be interesting to see what your co-workers pick as their “unique identifier.” We can all spend the day troubleshooting and brainstorming new ways to solve old problems.

Vilfredo Pareto was an economist who is widely credited for coming up with the Pareto Principle, more commonly known as the 80/20 rule. The rule serves as a reminder for entrepreneurs to focus their attention on the relatively small number of tasks that provide the largest return on investment.

In 1906, Pareto, who was living in Italy, noted that 20 percent of the population owned 80 percent of the property. He proposed that the ratio could be found many places in the physical world and theorized it might be a natural law. The theory was advanced by Dr. Joseph Juran, an American who is widely credited with being the father of quality control. It was Dr. Juran who decided to call the ratio the “The Pareto Principle: The vital few (20%) and the useful many (80%).”

Dr. J. M. Juran started applying this principal to defect analysis – separating the “vital few” from the “trivial many”, and called it the “Pareto Chart”. In fact, many (most) defect distributions follow a similar pattern, with a relatively small number of issues accounting for an overwhelming share of the defects. The Pareto Chart shows the relative frequency of defects in rank-order, and thus provides a prioritization tool so that process improvement activities can be organized to “get the most bang for the buck”, or “pick the low-hanging fruit”.

About This Blog

The WhatIs.com Word of the Day archive is like an impressionist painting about information technology. Close up, the focus seems to be on random tech terms. Take a step back and look at all the posts together — and you begin to see a clear picture of how enterprise IT is evolving.